


Iridescent

by javalorum



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Gen, Waiting for the End, iridescent, music video, one sided Chester Bennington/Mike Shinoda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 13:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9900311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/javalorum/pseuds/javalorum
Summary: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.This story is based on Linkin Park’s music video Iridescent. It also borrowed some imagery from their music video Waiting for the End. You don’t need to know the songs or the band to read this story.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea of this story while watching the music video of Iridescent and the Making of. I was very intrigued by Joe’s description of the video, and got this idea that may string the scenes together. I had always thought maybe this was his intention all along (well, maybe not the subtle Bennoda part which I just couldn’t help). I’m not a good writer in any capacity, and this is my first attempt to write in English. So please forgive me if the flow and wording are off. I would really wish for a beta, too, because I’m so bad with grammar (but the message board seemed to be inactive for a year now). I just wanted to string the visuals together and present my idea, and hopefully you’ll understand what I’m trying to describe despite my poor language skills.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

* * *

The Court Hall, like the castle itself, was entirely made of granite stone: grand, empty, and dark. The long wooden table, old and thick, looked dirty under the dim light.

Damn blind idiots, can't even clean a table properly.

The King shifted in his chair impatiently, squeezed the snake in the process. The snake hissed at him in displeasure, and slowly slithered onto his shoulders.

The only light came from the oil lamp above the King’s head. He had to light that himself, too. All the other lights above the long narrow table were still out. The servants in the palace (if this old stony dump could be called a palace) never seemed to understand the King might want to see the other attendants in his meetings. 

It got dark early in winter. Dirty windows blocked most of the light anyway. The King sat on one end of the long table, under the only relatively bright spot in the large room. The snake's slimy white skin wrapped around his body, he looked lonely, and out of place.

"Did you get that, your Majesty?" came the voice of the Chancellor.

The King turned to look at the man sitting to his right. 

"Your majesty, this has been delayed for more than a week. If you do not repair the city boundary tomorrow, we'll lose even more people."

"What boundary?"

"The one to the west of the city. It was destroyed during the last wind storm. Three kids lost their lives today when they wandered out of boundary." The consoler patiently repeated what he said a minute ago.

"Ok. I got it."

"Then I will get a vehicle, and we'll set off the first thing in the morning." He found the paper in front of him, and was about to use a needle to mark something down.

"I planned to take tomorrow off. I just finished repairing the northeast boundary." The King got more impatient. A king was not meant to run errands for his blind subjects.

"Your Majesty," the Chancellor put down his needle, and was calm as usual, "Our kingdom is surrounded by cliffs and transformer's graveyards. You are the only one that can mark the boundary for us."

"Next week. I'll go next week." the King knocked on the stack of paper in front of the Chancellor with his knuckles. The stack of paper was really just a pile of old magazine scraps loosely bounded by hand twisted thread.

The person sitting on his left suddenly got up, knocking over the chair behind him. This spooked the snake. She quickly slid inside the King's jacket. The General walked out of the Court Hall without a word.

The King stuck out his tongue, "What's with him?" he asked.

The Chancellor put down the needle he used for writing. His face was caught in the area between the lamp light and its shadow. His usually expressionless face suddenly looked weary:

"One of the kids who got killed today, was his son."

* * *

The King stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. He quietly watched the General storming out of the castle. It had started snowing earlier in the day. The ground was already covered by a thin layer of whiteness. The black marks were his footprints.

Ever since he was left with one eye, black and white seemed to be the only colors left in this world.

He shifted his eyes inside. The eight or nine ministers were still sitting by the table, silently. The war has been over for five years now. Yet they still looked and acted just like when they were pulled out of dead bodies: listless, depressed, and detached.

Near the window, in the area that could get a little more light on a sunny day, stood some isles. There were painted portraits on each one of them.

Everybody seemed to have forgotten, before the war the King was an artist.

He was a poor artists who barely made enough money for his food, but he was happy as a clam just from soaking in the colors and lines that he created all day. He could stare at something for days before finally putting it on a canvas, and even that was just so that he could enjoy looking at it more later. He felt he was put on earth to observe all beauties in the world. He was free as a bird.

But it all ended when the explosion happened. And one day, the Chancellor showed up at his door, having stumbled through his neighborhood looking for him. He was given a crown with a weight he didn’t deserve, in every sense of the word.

He never wanted them to think of him as the last hope for the entire humanity.

The snake slid along his shoulders. She must be hungry, for she started tugging at his shirt to get his attention.

At least she was still here.

The King sighed. In a world of blind people, a painter was probably the saddest existence. No one in the entire world would ever know what he painted.

But at the same time, this was also the most intriguing thought: nobody else would ever find out what he painted.

He smiled, somewhat mischievously. Only in this corner, in front of the snake, he could feel like his old self, the one that was free like a bird.

Because no one would ever know that all of these paintings had one person only.

The General.

Him looking thoughtful, him looking proud, him looking happy. But there were more paintings of his frowns, his despair, his anger.

The one at the front was the biggest canvas. The General appeared from the dark background, his posture was somewhat slanted. His face was blank because the King hadn’t been able to paint the perfect expression.

Heartbreak.

The King painted many sad Generals. They lived in the perfect age for sadness. The General seemed to have become more grieve stricken, just like the rest of them. And yet, every time when the King saw him looking glum, looking fragile, there was always one small voice in his head that said: not enough.

He knew how cruel this must have sounded. But in a time when the whole world seemed to have gone mad, worse things had been forgiven, or forgotten, intentionally.

If only if he was quicker earlier. He knew the expression on the General’s face must have been very sad.

He sighed again, letting the snake slid down from his arm. She slithered out of the hall to look for food.

* * *

The General walked in the snow.

He had left the city boundary a couple of hours ago. Unlike the King, he was already in the army when the War with Transformer started. He had been through this route many times when he stationed in this area. He had no problem figuring out where he was going.

He knew he had come close to the edge of the old city. Ahead of him was the Valley of Transformers. It was the biggest transformer graveyard in this area.

This was not a safe place. Transformers, a thousand times bigger than a human being, were scattered in here. A man would easily fall into the space between their gaps and die.

But the General just didn’t care anymore.

Perhaps he has already died five years ago.

His wife had died, along with fourteen billion other people. Only he and his son lived.

His son was six-years-old. Sometimes even he would wonder if his son’s survival was a good thing. Why would a world filled with cold and darkness, where man were merely surviving and not living, want with a six-year-old boy?

The answer was, it didn’t.

So he kept on walking.

When the pebbles and snow crumbled and disappeared from under his feet, the General only felt relief.

* * *

He did not die as he hoped he would.

When he came to, he found that he was in a long and narrow space, likely a gap between dead transformers.

He heard a sound: beep beep, beep beep, beep beep.

He followed the sound.

He walked for a long time. Then, suddenly, he found he could see.

He saw that in front of him was a massive cave. It was a real cave made of rocks, the size of a soccer stadium. A dead transformer slouched in one corner. Correction, he was not dead. The light on the front of his chest was still on. It wasn’t very bright, but it was enough to light up most of the cave. There was a long opening on top of the cave. Snow was drifting down through it. Slowly, weightlessly, like ashes falling after an explosion.

On the ground stood a tiny person, his clothes shabby, his face dusty, his white eyes opened wide in surprise, his jaw slacked.

The General realized that was him.

When transformers first reached earth, one group was friendly. They established an alliance with humans, and exchanged many technologies between them. Shortly after, the transformers figured out a way to communicate with humans telepathically. They were able to share sights, sounds and thoughts with one or more humans.

That group of transformers had been long gone. They were completely wiped out by the bad transformers. Then, after that, the bad transformers started the war with humans.

It wasn’t a war, really. It was slaughter. If humans hadn’t invented the secret weapon that eventually wiped out every single transformer on earth, the last five thousand humans wouldn’t have survived.

He didn’t know why this transformer wasn’t destroyed by the weapon. Its appearance suggested that it was disposed here to die in this cave long before the secret weapon was deployed. Maybe the cave had some special property that blocked the power of the weapon.

The General stood straighter, and adjusted his scarf. After losing his sights for so long, he didn’t realized how pathetic he looked.

“Who are you?” he asked. He had to use the mental image to calculate where the transformer was sitting, because the image was collected with the transformer’s perspective.

There was no reply.

“Can you speak?” he walked closer. “Can you move?”

He walked all the way to the light. He could feel the warm light on his body. He touched the transformer’s foot, then one of his fingers on the ground. He could feel the soft vibration of machines running under the surface.

“Are you dying,” he asked. “like me?”

The General tried hard to remember what he had learned during transformer communication training. But he couldn’t feel its thoughts.

He spent the next few hours working on it. In the end, he concluded that the transformer’s body was still functional like any other simple machine, but his mind had died. The sight he projected out were merely a mechanical act, just like the light on his chest. They were only on because nobody turned it off.

He then changed his experiment. He attempted to use his brain to control the transformer, which was another chapter in his training manual back then. This time, it worked almost immediately. He made the transformer break through the cave roof and stand up.

The General slowly climbed up the transformer, eventually made his way onto its shoulder and sat there. The standing transformer was now much higher than the cave roof. He could see in the distant horizon, the sun had risen behind dark clouds. The sky was many shades of grey. The transformer had a grey cape on. It was all torn and broken, flowing madly behind its back, along with snow and wind.

Around him, the scattered bodies of transformers formed an eerie and menacing sight.

But the General is no longer scared. He put out his hand to touch the snowflakes that flew down from the high heavens. He laughed.

* * *

The General returned around dinner time.

The King was pleased. He had thought the General got himself killed during his reckless act of rebellion. Then he would never be able to paint that expression that he’d be dreaming for so long.

He watched the General as he ate with the other ministers. His clothes were torn, his face and body were covered in dirt and blood. He looked like he could fall asleep standing up. And yet, he had this strange energy about him. It made him look almost … excited. He gobbled down food as if he didn’t eat in days.

For some reason, this made the King a little nervous.

Even the snake had felt it. She stayed close by the King, refused to leave.

“How have you been?” he heard the Chancellor asking him. The two of them were always close.

“Nothing. I fell, almost died.” The General let out a self-mocking laughter. He put more soup into his bowl, and asked, rather casually, “Have you heard of ‘the last weapon’?”

The Chancellor thought for a moment, “The one that destroyed all the transformers?”

“Yeah.”

“It hasn’t been brought up for years. All the transformers were wiped out already. It’s useless now.”

“I remembered it could be used as an energy source. The machines we used to grow crops are getting old, you know.”

The Chancellor shrugged, “That stuff explodes easily. It’d be a disaster to attempt to modify it. Besides, as I remember all of ‘the last weapon’ were bundled together to create the explosion big enough to kill all the transformers around the world. I don’t think there’d be any left.”

“That’s a pity.”

The Chancellor put a comforting arm on the General’s back.

The General studied the cup in his hand thoughtfully. The King could see what the Chancellor couldn’t. The General’s face didn’t show any disappointment.

After dinner, the King asked the General to remain by the table. The General was sitting a few seats away from him, silently in the dark.

“Can you move over to the seat beside me? I can’t see you.”

The General walked over slowly, touched the seat beside him, then sat down.

The snake quietly slid out of the King’s jacket. She came to stay near the arm of the General’s chair.

“I’m going to the west of the city to do the boundary tomorrow. Will you go with me?” the King said.

The General was surprised. For a second the King thought he saw grief on his face, but then quickly as it came, his face became blank again. “It doesn’t matter now.” He said.

Pity. And he was under such good lighting too. It was too short. The King sighed silently.

“I suppose you think I’m incompetent?” he asked.

The General nodded, “Yes.”

“It’s not my idea to be king, you know.” The king said, “I only wished to ---“

“And that’s why I’m going to revolt.” The General said quietly, cutting him off.

The King was so surprised he shot up in his seat. In a split second the snack attacked, she bit the General’s wrist.

“One word from me, she’ll bit down.” The King swallowed hard, attempting to calm himself down.

The General didn’t move or say anything. Sweat was forming on his forehead. The snake did not bite all the way, but small streams of blood was already dripping down from his wrist.

“I don’t want to kill you, you know.” The King said, “I need someone like you.”

“But we don’t need you.” The General said. His other hand lifted up, he had concealed a small knife in his sleeve. He quickly pulled it out and sliced the snake’s neck. In one shrift move, the snake’s lifeless body fell off the chair.

The King had no time to mourn his only companion in the world. He yelled as he ran towards the door, “Guards! Guards!” while quickly threw chairs behind him.

It worked on the blind General. He fell almost immediately. As he was getting up the guards outside was already pushing the door open. So he gave up chasing the King and ran out instead.

The guards were not used to assassination attempts. Nobody tried to block the General. He ran all the way out of the castle and out of the city.

* * *

The General was efficient. He spent two week figuring out how to control the transformer. In the two weeks after that, he had already gathered most of the peasants in the west part of the city.

Based on the words from the people who saw them, it was an amazing sight. A group of people in rags following a fifty-meter high transformer. On its shoulder sat the General, silent and determined. The transformer could project sights to whoever that came near it. The range was about ten meters.

This by itself was already a temptation that nobody could refuse. The General didn’t need to plan any attacks. He could just let the transformer walk slowly, and more and more people could gather around him.

A few days later, the King saw the sight with his own eye.

The General sat on the transformer’s shoulder. They were outside the castle’s outer wall. The General was wise enough not to let the transformer stand too close to the solders on the wall. The soldiers were busy packing and firing cannons in complete blindness, so the King had to run back and forth showing them the direction. They fired many cannons, most of which completely missed the target. And those that did hit didn’t cause much damage anyway.

The Chancellor ran by with outstretched hands, “Your Majesty, please come in with me.”

The King threw his arms away, “Not now! You go!”

“Your Majesty, I have a plan.”

The King thought about it. The transformer obviously didn’t have a weapon. The only way for it to get in was by pushing down the walls with his arms. While the cannons were still being fired, he didn’t think the General would let it get close enough to the wall to push it.

“Fine. But don’t even think about tricking me.” The King said as he and the Chancellor ran into the castle.

“Your Majesty, have you heard of ‘the last weapon’?” once they were inside, the Chancellor immediately shut the door, and asked.

The King was puzzled, “I thought you said they were all gone?”

“’The last weapon’ was invented when humanity was almost completely wiped out. And right after it was invented, it caused the great explosion that destroyed all transformers. That is why almost everybody, including me, thought it was some sort of a bomb. However, based on the information I’ve found, it’s in fact a radio wave that can be turned on and off many times.”

“What?!! Where is it?” the King couldn’t believe their good luck. He smiled for the first time since the snake died.

“In the catacombs. There are many stairs and turns. I need your Majesty’s help getting down there.” The Chancellor clutched the King’s arm tightly. “Let us go.”

They quickly ran down the basement and into the catacombs.

“The question from the General before he revolted got me thinking. I knew he didn’t come back to assassinate your Majesty. He came back to make sure that we don’t have ‘the last weapon’. Because his only weapon was the transformer. So I’ve been doing research ever since he left.” The Chancellor explained.

By the time they finally found the little box that the Chancellor called “the last weapon”, the world above the ground had almost crumbled into pieces. All the cannons were gone, soldiers ran out, castle’s outer wall was pushed down.

The King and the Chancellor ran back to the ground level, just in time to see the transformer pulling out the front wall of the castle. It then stepped back a few meters and threw the stones to its side. The general jump down from its shoulder onto one of its hand, then the hand dropped down to about the height of the second level of the castle. All the people following the General now appeared from behind the wreckage, including the soldiers who were just shooting cannons at him.

The mid-day sun was bright despite the many layers of dark clouds in front of it. The light on the General was white and very soft.

The Chancellor rammed through the keypad on the top of the box. He punched a code. 

“Please stop, General!” He yelled as he lifted up the box for all to see.

“What is that?” the General asked.

“The last weapon.” The Chancellor said. “General, if you insist on doing this, you would leave us with no other way.”

“You told me there was no ‘last weapon’ left.”

“Luckily I was wrong.”

The General crouched down on one knee in the transformer’s hand, he said, rather sincerely, “Chancellor, I wish you will not stand on his side. You know how incompetent he is, how uncaring.”

“I know.” The Chancellor paused. “However, we have to destroy that thing.”

“Why?” the General was genuinely puzzled.

“Because the world of humans can’t have transformers. In any capacity.” The Chancellor said. “They have destroyed our planet.”

His white eyes faced the General, “Every time we put hope on them, we ended up going one step further into destruction.”

“Every time we put hope on him,” the General pointed at the King, he had been getting very good at reading directions through the transformer’s view now, “we didn’t move one step away from hell.”

The Chancellor opened the box.

The transformer suddenly stepped forward, he walked all the way up to the castle.

Even the King could see the sight the transformer projected now. It was a strange picture filled with glowing lines and dots. It was far dimmer than human sight, and grainier. There was almost no color.

But that was enough to drive the Chancellor mad.

“I can see! I can see!” he yelled frantically, he looked like he was going to run to the transformer. In a split second, the King grabbed the box from his hands. The Chancellor wanted to get it back, but he forgot the sight was taken from the transformer’s perspective and went the wrong direction. The King quickly ran away from him.

“No! Don’t kill him!” the Chancellor screamed desperately.

But the King’s finger was already pushing down the button inside the box.

* * *

In the short moment after the transparent radio wave left the box and before it reached the transformer, the King was surprised to find that he was suddenly looking at the paintings in the Court Hall on the third floor. It was projected by the transformer, he realized. Through its eyes, every painting was as if made up of tiny, glowing stars. They looked breathtakingly beautiful. The expressions on them looked ethereal, yet very real at the same time.

And there is the one in the front, the one with the blank face.

It was not blank any more. Through the King’s own eye, he saw the General. He realized the general had received the same sight.

His face was showing the expression that the King had been dreaming to see: the utter sadness, grief, and despair.

The heartbreak.

Where is my brush?

An iridescent light came from the heart of the transformer. In that one moment, the sky was filled with every color imaginable. The colors were almost a solid existence, as if they had volume and weight. They were bouncing and flashing freely in the air.

This was the most beautiful sight the King had seen for the second time.

When the light finally faded, the King found he was surrounded by darkness.

A loud noise came from close by, as the transformer died and fell to the ground. When the ringing from his ears stopped, the King found he was still lying in complete darkness.

“The light from the transformer’s explosion will make a human blind.” The Chancellor’s voice came from his side. He sounded strangely detached and hollow. 

“We couldn’t figure out why you had one eye left. We guessed it was because of your snake, because she was the only animal survived the explosion.

“But that is no longer relevant. She’s already gone, isn’t she?

“And now you’re just like us. Now the world will have light no more.”

“Where is the General?” The King asked softly.

“Killed, perhaps. He was too close to the transformer to be alive.”

At that time, the King knew that his world would have light no more.


End file.
